There's no shortage of talent. If there was a shortage we would see real indicators of a shortage like increasing average salaries across the field, training programs, etc.
Instead employers consistently use bullshit to filter, puzzles without any relation to the job, etc in their hiring. That's a strong indicator that there's no shortage. If employers are making up things to filter candidates, then they have too many options.
If I had to guess, this is probably just more propaganda from the large tech companies to get more people into the field and an increased visa cap, so they can drive down wages.
The 'puzzle' part is the best filter for them. Any professional programmer who has spent many years writing stock exchanges/banks/financial systems has not had any recent practice delving into the intricacies of the most commonly provided abstract data types. They probably have come across concurrency and synchronisation problems for which there is no simple one line answer so those questions don't get asked. I can't recall the last time someone told me 'this std::map or python dict()' is not fast enough, can you delve into it and make a better one. The skill is in the selection considering the big picture.
Some recent graduate will have looked at all this recently and easily pass this barrier, get the job and move on in a short amount of time while they can.
Is there a IT staff shortage? There probably is a shortage of people who don't spend their spare time on hacker-rank or don't really feel motivated enough to spend a day on a bullshit contrived project. There are plenty of you people who don't mind.
Bingo! And it's not just in tech/IT, but in other related fields as well. The real answer is that the Fed has been a bit overly skittish when it comes to balancing economic growth vs. inflation, despite real inflation remaining at very low rates over the past decade.
I wonder about this, I don't dispute that there is an issue here, but I think that this, and similar analyses, fails to take into account the change in the size of the IT workforce over time. I'm currently 47, I started my first paid developer role (job title "Analyst/Programmer"!) 25 years ago. The size of the job market then was a fraction of the size that it is now. Inevitably there are fewer older people in the workforce.
I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter (yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.
Age discrimination is real, if for no other reason that the older you get, the more likely you are to have had a major health issue.
Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.
Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment, but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.
Age discrimination in hiring is real. Companies get around it by saying, "Oh, we can't possibly pay what someone with your level of experience expects."
Usually even before a dollar figure has even been discussed.
As has been mentioned in here, the "Talent Shortage" was made up to get an increase in H1B visa workers to drive down wages and get more for their money. It has always been about flooding the developer job market.
Case in point are the interviews at many big tech companies that require leetcode/algorithms interviews. Companies are ready to reject any candidate that makes even a small mistake on one of their solutions, or misses the exact optimal solution. If they really needed top talent and couldn't find it, they wouldn't be so careless in their hiring rejections.
Another issue is also that its really difficult to quickly shift tech stacks on a dime. As much as people like to claim it to be possible, even just upgrading from Hadoop/MapReduce/Older big data technologies to Apache Spark is a massive time investment. The paradigms are the same, the technology when used in practice is different. Workers can see their whole knowledge base become useless in the span of two years.
As an individual worker, if this happens three times in 8 years, I think burnout would be expected. Anyone who is capable of constantly updating their technology knowledge to a T is probably already CTO of a company somewhere. Maintaining the ability to memorize and understand inane minutia over a few decades span is rare, and is probably coupled with severe disabilities in other areas of life.
I feel as partially this happens because older people don't buy into the hype, can read through BS, and won't slave away 70 hrs a week for the same wage.
Younger people are less experienced, have less opinions and in most case less life lessons. Tech companies want to move fast and make money, not question what is ethical.
Younger people don't have fewer opinions from my own experience. They often have plenty of opinions, and with that comes less experience to back them up.
As I've gotten older I've become far less likely to express opinions unless the issue I am offering an opinion on is one that's important, and one that I am able to offer some new perspective on. I wasn't that way at 25.
> and won't slave away 70 hrs a week for the same wage.
I’m not even 40, though close to it, and I’m already here. The company I’ve worked for has routinely offered 4x10 work schedules to its employees but the group I am now in is considering whether to end that practice. I will quit if that happens even though I probably wouldn’t have just five years ago. I have no interest in commuting one more day and losing a day off (and a weekday off, no less, when I can get personal appointments and leisure things done).
With every day that passes, I weight time away from work and time for leisure far more than I do money. Even though I have nowhere near enough to retire and any “low-stress” job wouldn’t pay me enough to live in my metro area, I would still walk away and consider what to do next if that benefit is revoked.
Honestly, the best devs/CTOs I worked with are older than 45...
I don’t get why our industry is like this. Learn from the (old) masters... thats true for art as well as for coding
> One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial intelligence
I am 38, I am in the gap they point out, and I almost fell in it because for too long I thought deep learning was a hype that would eventually die out. I had to have a client force me to look into it to realize that half of my skillset in computer vision became obsolete almost overnight, and the other half is eroding quickly.
We think we know better than the youngsters and in several fields, that's painfully obvious, but let's not be oblivious to the fact that tech still evolves and that half of our job is catching up with it.
Would you mind elaborating? As a young developer who wishes to remain a in the engineering track long term, Id like to understand more about how you realized your skill set was no longer “up to par”. I’m surprised computer vision is becoming less relevant, is it because the techniques have shifted from known algorithms that work to using machine learning to develop better algorithms from training?
There was an interesting piece on the CBS Evening News, maybe this past Friday, about how some companies are bringing in older (50+) workers to great benefit. The only thing these people ask for is flexible schedules.
I think this is a huge part of the conversation that is being overlooked. Younger workers are perhaps more willing to grind than more experienced devs.
I’d gladly take 20% pay cut to get Fridays off, but I’d get laughed out of my current gig if I asked for that.
It seems like most gigs are full-time, usually with an on-call rotation, and if those aren’t compatible with your schedule, good luck.
Why pay an older software engineer a high rate for a wealth of experience when you can hire two graduates who won't make a 25 year old trust fund baby tech bro feel inadequate
Odd that nobody is writing articles about how airlines are hiring 25 year old pilots or hospitals are recruiting 25 year old ansetheseologists. Their 55 year old colleagues stuck looking for gainful employment.
> One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial intelligence, said Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner at 10x Ascend, an advisory firm for senior technology job seekers.
Um, what? AI isn't taking any tech jobs. Maybe once we figure out how to have the robots program themselves...
When you job interview around the bay area one thing which is absolutely striking is the diversity of the companies you visit. Sometimes it feels like you're in different countries on opposite sides of the planet. There's no way that is accidental, agism and racism is absolutely rampant, but not necessarily along traditional lines.
I am over 40 right now, and, frankly, I don't see too much of this problem right now.
As you get older, you need to understand that you need to adapt. It's easier to get in the trap of thinking that the old ways are better (and sometimes, indeed they are), but it doesn't matter. You have to go with the flow.
Another important thing is that you shouldn't get too attached to technologies. Move with the times, be aggressive with learning.
Appreciate new languages, new paradigms. Yes, it sucks when you spent hours honing your skills with Hadoop and then one day you find out that all the cool kids are doing spark. But, the thing is, the people that are doing spark now are the people that were doing Hadoop yesterday, some of them even older than you. It was you that got in the comfort zone and didn't see that the field was evolving.
While you were satisfied doing Hadoop, some people were thinking of how the job could be done in a different way.
And I am not telling here that you should be doing open source, but you should have kept yourself on the loop.
It is not unfair, and it's not unique to our profession. there was a time where lobotomy was the hot thing on psychiatry, people probably spent hours honing their skills on it, and then, someday, science evolved and we figured out that those skills were not only useless but also dangerous. Maybe this happens way faster in our profession, but also it is a lot easier for us to keep ourselves current on the state of the art than for a surgeon.
There are a whole slew of issues related to this. Managers often feel that older employees don't take them as seriously as younger people. Younger folk are less likely to have seen it 'all' like older workers. There's also the age dynamic of an org. Some companies hire young because of the culture of 'work hard play hard' where younger folk buy-in but older folks skip it and go home to their families. Older people are more experienced and more expensive in general. Younger people are also more likely to be willing to work to burn out as they've not done it before and managers know that.
My two pronged approach to getting older in the workforce is to make sure there are people older than me at my work place, and have an exit strategy for when the jobs dry up completely.
Age has been explicitly called out in every D&I initiative I've been party to, just not as loudly as some other segments, namely gender, sexual orientation, and race. But definitely mentioned.
If this is a real thing then it's something I'd want to take advantage of if I started a start up.
American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated against.
This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40. If these people are being excluded for age and not for real reasons like ability then they are undervalued by the market.
It'd be interesting to have roles that are explicitly only for people 40+. I'd want to do this and pair them with younger kids out of college who are just learning how to be effective SWEs as part of the role.
Seems like a big potential hiring advantage if the ageism is a real thing.
Youngsters are more malleable to whatever theocratic management scheme you want to shoehorn in. Oldie don't buy in the cult driven bend-over management schemes used in many places.
Management can hire 2 fresh grads, roughly same cost as 1 senior candidate. There are companies where headcount is important for managers to become and grow their org. In addition, fresh grads usually have exposure to latest stuff and are eager to make their way in, work 60+ hrs, have fresh perspective, can crack academic style company interviews. Overall good for the company for less money.
Interesting to read that "the largest gap occurs among workers ages 35 to 44”. This is the first wave of internet professionals, the people who built the web as we know it. Above that age range and you're getting into old school IT territory, and below you've got the new wave of web developers with different ideas who might regard the old guard as being stuck in their ways.
[+] [-] rgbrenner|6 years ago|reply
Instead employers consistently use bullshit to filter, puzzles without any relation to the job, etc in their hiring. That's a strong indicator that there's no shortage. If employers are making up things to filter candidates, then they have too many options.
If I had to guess, this is probably just more propaganda from the large tech companies to get more people into the field and an increased visa cap, so they can drive down wages.
[+] [-] vsskanth|6 years ago|reply
Isn't this happening right now in software with coding bootcamps and no minimum degree reqs ?
What's the new grad salary for an engineer at a top N firm in 2019 compared to 2011 ?
[+] [-] h3throw|6 years ago|reply
I'm 28yrs old and I make ~$400K/yr. That doesn't happen when there's some major abundance of talent sitting around.
[+] [-] mianos|6 years ago|reply
Some recent graduate will have looked at all this recently and easily pass this barrier, get the job and move on in a short amount of time while they can.
Is there a IT staff shortage? There probably is a shortage of people who don't spend their spare time on hacker-rank or don't really feel motivated enough to spend a day on a bullshit contrived project. There are plenty of you people who don't mind.
[+] [-] rednerrus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skwb|6 years ago|reply
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-s...
[+] [-] purplezooey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijiiijji1|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pacaro|6 years ago|reply
I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter (yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.
[+] [-] monoideism|6 years ago|reply
Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.
Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment, but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
Usually even before a dollar figure has even been discussed.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingslave|6 years ago|reply
Case in point are the interviews at many big tech companies that require leetcode/algorithms interviews. Companies are ready to reject any candidate that makes even a small mistake on one of their solutions, or misses the exact optimal solution. If they really needed top talent and couldn't find it, they wouldn't be so careless in their hiring rejections.
Another issue is also that its really difficult to quickly shift tech stacks on a dime. As much as people like to claim it to be possible, even just upgrading from Hadoop/MapReduce/Older big data technologies to Apache Spark is a massive time investment. The paradigms are the same, the technology when used in practice is different. Workers can see their whole knowledge base become useless in the span of two years.
As an individual worker, if this happens three times in 8 years, I think burnout would be expected. Anyone who is capable of constantly updating their technology knowledge to a T is probably already CTO of a company somewhere. Maintaining the ability to memorize and understand inane minutia over a few decades span is rare, and is probably coupled with severe disabilities in other areas of life.
[+] [-] avgDev|6 years ago|reply
Younger people are less experienced, have less opinions and in most case less life lessons. Tech companies want to move fast and make money, not question what is ethical.
[+] [-] kasey_junk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|6 years ago|reply
I find this almost always to be the opposite.
[+] [-] elcaminocomplex|6 years ago|reply
As I've gotten older I've become far less likely to express opinions unless the issue I am offering an opinion on is one that's important, and one that I am able to offer some new perspective on. I wasn't that way at 25.
[+] [-] techsupporter|6 years ago|reply
I’m not even 40, though close to it, and I’m already here. The company I’ve worked for has routinely offered 4x10 work schedules to its employees but the group I am now in is considering whether to end that practice. I will quit if that happens even though I probably wouldn’t have just five years ago. I have no interest in commuting one more day and losing a day off (and a weekday off, no less, when I can get personal appointments and leisure things done).
With every day that passes, I weight time away from work and time for leisure far more than I do money. Even though I have nowhere near enough to retire and any “low-stress” job wouldn’t pay me enough to live in my metro area, I would still walk away and consider what to do next if that benefit is revoked.
[+] [-] Lendal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkd|6 years ago|reply
Previous blue-chip job history with 100% application success rate, through my 20s and 30s.
Have now left the industry due to what I and various recruitment professionals had to conclude was age discrimination.
It exists.
[+] [-] mpfundstein|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iv|6 years ago|reply
I am 38, I am in the gap they point out, and I almost fell in it because for too long I thought deep learning was a hype that would eventually die out. I had to have a client force me to look into it to realize that half of my skillset in computer vision became obsolete almost overnight, and the other half is eroding quickly.
We think we know better than the youngsters and in several fields, that's painfully obvious, but let's not be oblivious to the fact that tech still evolves and that half of our job is catching up with it.
[+] [-] ecnahc515|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] save_ferris|6 years ago|reply
I’d gladly take 20% pay cut to get Fridays off, but I’d get laughed out of my current gig if I asked for that.
It seems like most gigs are full-time, usually with an on-call rotation, and if those aren’t compatible with your schedule, good luck.
[+] [-] noicebrewery|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleenn|6 years ago|reply
Um, what? AI isn't taking any tech jobs. Maybe once we figure out how to have the robots program themselves...
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcoseliziario|6 years ago|reply
As you get older, you need to understand that you need to adapt. It's easier to get in the trap of thinking that the old ways are better (and sometimes, indeed they are), but it doesn't matter. You have to go with the flow.
Another important thing is that you shouldn't get too attached to technologies. Move with the times, be aggressive with learning.
Appreciate new languages, new paradigms. Yes, it sucks when you spent hours honing your skills with Hadoop and then one day you find out that all the cool kids are doing spark. But, the thing is, the people that are doing spark now are the people that were doing Hadoop yesterday, some of them even older than you. It was you that got in the comfort zone and didn't see that the field was evolving. While you were satisfied doing Hadoop, some people were thinking of how the job could be done in a different way. And I am not telling here that you should be doing open source, but you should have kept yourself on the loop. It is not unfair, and it's not unique to our profession. there was a time where lobotomy was the hot thing on psychiatry, people probably spent hours honing their skills on it, and then, someday, science evolved and we figured out that those skills were not only useless but also dangerous. Maybe this happens way faster in our profession, but also it is a lot easier for us to keep ourselves current on the state of the art than for a surgeon.
[+] [-] sys_64738|6 years ago|reply
My two pronged approach to getting older in the workforce is to make sure there are people older than me at my work place, and have an exit strategy for when the jobs dry up completely.
[+] [-] throwawaybungie|6 years ago|reply
Is that others’ experience?
[+] [-] sethammons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t34543|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotburrito|6 years ago|reply
This article stresses me out and makes me feel like if I don't get my next good job in a year or so I am basically locked out of a career...
I hope this is not true!
[+] [-] gonehome|6 years ago|reply
American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated against.
This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40. If these people are being excluded for age and not for real reasons like ability then they are undervalued by the market.
It'd be interesting to have roles that are explicitly only for people 40+. I'd want to do this and pair them with younger kids out of college who are just learning how to be effective SWEs as part of the role.
Seems like a big potential hiring advantage if the ageism is a real thing.
[+] [-] keyle|6 years ago|reply
In short, they outwit their own positions.
[+] [-] kundiis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanoz|6 years ago|reply